


coincidences are imaginary (or, how Carlos Ramon came to Night Vale)

by piedpiper



Category: Magic School Bus, Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: Carlos (Night Vale) is Carlos Ramon, Carlos is a Dork, Gen, POV Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale), Scientist Carlos (Welcome to Night Vale)
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-03-14
Updated: 2014-03-14
Packaged: 2018-01-15 15:45:15
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,267
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1310287
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/piedpiper/pseuds/piedpiper
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p> When Carlos is in fourth grade, he surprises absolutely nobody by announcing on Career Day that he wants to be a scientist when he grows up. They all want to be scientists at this point. The fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Zimmer, is getting extremely frustrated at being handed an entire grade's worth of inquiring young minds at the beginning of every single school year since he started teaching at Walkerville Elementary.</p>
            </blockquote>





	coincidences are imaginary (or, how Carlos Ramon came to Night Vale)

**Author's Note:**

> In my humble opinion, the Carlos-from-Night-Vale-is-Carlos-from-Magic-School-Bus theory is probably the greatest bandwagon that the Night Vale fandom has ever jumped on. As soon as I started seeing posts about the idea on Tumblr, I had to add to it with my own Carlos origin fic.
> 
> Disclaimer: I have not picked up a Magic School Bus book for something like 8 years and I never actually watched the TV show as a kid, so everything in the fic from that side of the fandom was picked up from half-formed memories and Wikipedia research. Therefore, please tell me if I've gotten the personalities of any of the Walkerville kids horribly wrong and I'll try my best to fix them.

 When Carlos is in fourth grade, he surprises absolutely nobody by announcing on Career Day that he wants to be a scientist when he grows up. They all want to be scientists at this point. The fourth-grade teacher, Mr. Zimmer, is getting extremely frustrated at being handed an entire grade's worth of inquiring young minds at the beginning of _every single school year_ since he started teaching at Walkerville Elementary. Phoebe is going to be a zoologist. Tim wants to be the illustrator for scientific articles in magazines. Even Ralphie is thinking, he says, of studying "something to do with lava."

Carlos doesn't know what exactly he wants to do yet, but he knows it will involve science. Science, of the bubbling-beakers-and-explosions-and-exciting-discoveries variety, of the building-gadgets-out-of-spare-parts-and-making-them-do-interesting-things variety. (D.A. hits him rather hard on the arm when he claims to be "bubbling over with excitement" for this, but it's actually kind of true.) He doesn't care that Mr. Zimmer wanted to be a classic-literature professor and has absolutely no interest in the scientific world. He doesn't care that he's never actually _seen_ Ms. Frizzle since the spring day he walked out of her classroom for the last time, which might count as more than a little odd for any other teacher or any other class. He doesn't even care, as the year goes on, that the other students find other interests and that by the time Thanksgiving rolls around Phoebe wants to be a writer and Ralphie wants to play professional baseball. Carlos knows, deep down, that he is going to be a scientist, as surely as he knows his hair is brown. Other people might use terms such as 'inscribed in his destiny.' Carlos wouldn't, because that's kind of weird, but the general idea is the same.

Carlos likes building things, and tinkering with electricity and mixing acids and bases together and occasionally singeing his eyebrows off. A lot of the time his gadgets don't work, but some of the time they do. Even the teachers, even Mr. Zimmer, have to admit that his automatic plant-watering and juice-mixing devices are pretty cool.

He's still working on the explosions-y part of the science, but he's confident he'll get there eventually.

When Carlos is in fifth grade, his energy-saving pedal-powered lawn-mowing device wins the school's science fair. His parents, who have previously assumed that Mikey will be the scientific genius of the family and Carlos will go into stand-up comedy or some such, start paying more attention to him. Carlos and Mikey confer and agree that science probably just runs in their family. They win the next two years' science fairs together before Mikey decides that he wants to go into computer programming versus physical science, thus precluding the possibility of any real rivalry between them. Which is fine, really.

The summer before he enters middle school, Carlos gets an honorable mention in a statewide young inventors' contest and wins a scholarship to some college class that he doesn't care about all that much but that his parents get very excited about. Looking back in a few years, he'll realize that mentioning this loudly on the first day of middle school is probably the exact moment that brands him as a nerd for the rest of his teenage life. The fact that he still speaks about forty percent in puns might have something to do with that too. He'll have to work on that, he realizes.

But currently, he doesn't care that much. Social life isn't really into Carlos at this point, and anyway, he's more content tinkering among beakers and wiring than anywhere else he could imagine. His parents worry that he's gotten quiet all of a sudden, in hushed voices down the stairs late at night, and Carlos pretends not to hear them.

He's glad, though, that he has the escape of his basement laboratory after school, because the rest of his life is rapidly becoming infinitely more confusing and awkward. Seventh grade expects different things of a person than sixth. Seventh grade expects you to grow up, and do it _fast_. Playing tag or ball with other kids at recess or after school is no longer enough to bind together friendships. Suddenly everything is about _talking_ , and about looking good and wearing the right clothes and saying exactly the right things, and neither being nerdy-smart nor being slapstick-funny is quite enough. And as for looking good, well, according to his parents he'll grow into his ears and nose someday.  

And there's more than that, a difference hovering on the edge of his consciousness that he's worried might be cause for concern. He sees girls and boys kissing amateurishly against their lockers almost every day, and something that he's always known but never put into context suddenly springs into focus. He knows he's not going to be like them.

He comes out to D.A. first, when she asks him out in the excitement of newly-minted teenagehood, because she deserves to know and would probably figure it out anyway by the next morning. "It's not you," he tells her, "I'm just... not straight." It's so _easy_ to say, and so easily received, that he's surprised at himself for overthinking things so much.

D.A., wonderful, acerbic D.A., doesn't bat an eye. "I figured," she says. "I just thought it couldn't hurt to ask. I'll set you up with Ralphie, then." And in the whirlwind of laughing negation and flailing arms Carlos can't quite manage to explain what he wants to say, which was much more than a matter of heterosexuality. He's gay, sure, and he doesn't really _care_ that he's gay, because it's almost the twenty-first century and it shouldn't matter that much anymore and the only reason he hasn't bothered to tell his parents yet is because it's never really come up.

But he doesn't think he sees the world in the same way as other people. He doesn't think other people ever _think_ about the world as it actually is, a buzzing collection of loosely connected atoms with infinities of space between one another. Other people get caught up in the mundanity of ordinary life, boys and girls and homes and jobs and a lifespan of seventy or eighty years perceived as much longer and less fragile than it really is. He doesn't know how anyone, after seeing all the bizarreness of the mere physical existence of life forms and mountains and galaxies, could ever worry about who might want to take them out to a movie. He doesn't think he could ever actually stay with someone who didn't understand him when he tried to explain this.

He goes out with Ralphie anyway, a couple times tentatively to see what this whole dating thing is about, and then more solidly. They make a good couple, even the straight kids in their grade agree. They sit in the park after sunset and kiss like professionals and Carlos forgets for the length of whole minutes about the spin of atoms (though not for long, never for long). They last all the way through summer, longer than anyone expects. And Carlos begins to wonder if maybe Ralphie (or Raf, as he wants to be called now, because 'Ralphie sounds like a little-kid name') does understand after all. After all, he was _there_. They went through _it_ together.

"Hey," Carlos says one day, when they're lying together on his bed, squished together by the sagging mattress and looking up at his junky old tempera-painted mobile of the solar system spinning slowly, "Raf, you remember third grade, right?"

Raf looks over at him, squinting a little in amusement. "Uh, yeah. How could I not?"

"Do you ever... think about it?" Carlos tries to sound casual, but he's trying to ask a different question than the one he says. "All the stuff we did?"

"In my nightmares, yeah, sure." Raf grins a little, but he looks uneasy. "I mean, we were just kids, we thought it was cool, but really? It was kind of messed up. I mean, I'd be afraid to get a job in science – war flashbacks! Foom!" He makes little explosion-y gestures with his hands, then sobers up. "What kind of teacher lets her class almost get _eaten_? What kind of teacher..." He trails off, and his eyes stare through the cracked plaster ceiling into the distance of years and memory. Carlos is pretty sure he knows what he means.

Apparently other people don't appreciate being shown first-hand that the universe is an enormous and terrifying place, is what he learns then. Apparently some people don't like their ideas of what's possible and what's impossible being shaken up and thrown out the window. He's not sure why he himself is so fine with it. Maybe there's something wrong with _him_ , some freaking-out switch that should have been thrown by the Bus but wasn't.

He and Raf break up by Halloween of that year, mostly for reasons other than third grade. Carlos meets other boys, other opportunities that feel almost-right but not quite. They're all cute, and smart, and funny and completely fall-in-love-with-able even. They just don't see the disintegration of the physical universe around them the way he sees it, which is _all the time_.

In high school he finally finds another science teacher who is thrilled to have someone to really _teach_ , and learns about atomic structures and quantum particles and genetic modification. And, even more importantly, learns about the things that nobody can teach because nobody _knows_ yet. He learns about the gaps in scientific knowledge and understanding, and the unexplained phenomena that are _not_ , his teacher stresses, supernatural or extraterrestrial in any way. It's just that, for all that science explains and understands, it _doesn't_ understand even more.

It's exactly what he wants to learn about. Carlos falls head over heels in love with science all over again.

He gets into a good college, almost without trying, and is much less excited about it than his family can fathom. It's not that he's not happy about it; it's just that there's no surprise there. Carlos knows that he's smart, that he's _very_ smart. He knows Mikey will get a full scholarship when he applies the next year too, because science runs in the Ramon family. He's known since fourth grade that he would be a scientist; this is just one more step on the way, one more foot in front of the other. He's not being cocky. Some things he just knows.

When the college interviewer asks him if he knows what he would like to study, he says he's interested in applied chemistry of some kind, because saying "Unexplained scientific phenomena and cryptozoology, mostly," is not the kind of thing that gets one into prestigious universities, or any universities at all actually. It's not really a lie, anyway. He does like applied chemistry, because how much more science-y can you get than watching things bubble in beakers?

At college, he takes chemistry and physics and bio during the day and spends his evenings reading up on spontaneous combustion and unexplained meteorological occurrences, and slides through four years almost but not quite at the top of his class, right into grad school. He manages to find a real job, switching from bagging groceries at Stop & Shop during the day to working nights in a lab for a vague yet high-up-sounding government agency. He studies the various effects of radioactive decay, and doesn't sleep much. He keeps getting promised that it will get him places someday.

 He's very happy. He really is.

He keeps an eye on unexplained phenomena still, and tells himself that after he's earned his PhD he'll find a grant from somewhere to go research them. Someday, he tells himself. Someday when the time is right.

Carlos is _not_ expecting the phone call. It vibrates through the pocket of his lab coat one night when he's working even later than usual, and he almost flips out and drops the beaker he's holding, because nobody _ever_ calls him. Certainly not these days. He's newly graduated and more newly single, and not exactly disposed to be social. He has to fumble around with beakers and gloves for a few long moments before he manages to get his cell phone out of his pocket, and only has time to catch a glimpse of the illuminated caller ID screen before it goes dark. "Fuck," he mutters under his breath, and flips the phone open to listen to the message.

The voice on the phone is a woman's, young and breathless, almost like she's afraid of being overheard. "Carlos? Carlos Ramon? Carlos, it's D.A. Hangley, from school – I hope you remember me. I need to talk to you. It's important."

Carlos stares at the phone in his hand like it might explode. He hasn't been in contact with any of the Walkerville kids for _years_. He ran into Wanda once about three years ago, at an LGBTQIA meeting his boyfriend of the time dragged him to, and hardly recognized her. She had very short hair and a lot of eyeliner and said she was studying representation of women of color in popular music. They hadn't talked much.

And he hasn't heard from D.A. in _forever_. He only barely recognizes her voice.

"Look, I have to talk to you in person," the message goes on. "I don't want to say this on the phone. _God_ , that sounds stupid. I swear I don't talk like this usually. But, look, please meet me at the café on the corner of Fifth and Aspen as soon as you can. I'm there right now. I think you should know about this."

The line clicks. Carlos stares at the phone in his hand for a moment, then snaps it shut, shucks off his lab coat, calls a quick request over to his coworkers in the next room, and heads for the door.

He's never been before to the cafe D.A. mentioned, but it looks warm and inviting enough in the dim light of late dusk when he pulls up outside fifteen minutes later. He doesn't come to this part of town a lot; he triple-checks that his windows are all rolled up and doors locked before he leaves his car to its own devices and heads inside the café. Hey, he didn't get to be a scientist by being absentminded. He's not Fleming.

The cafe crowded this time of night, with multiple conversations and the smell of coffee and biscotti overwhelming Carlos' senses after so long working in the quiet and clinical lab. He has to scan the patrons a few times before he notices the blond woman in a blue turtleneck waiting nervously at a table by the window, fingers tapping the table in front of her.

He navigates his way around the tables to meet her. She doesn't notice him until he stands by the empty chair across from her, coughs, and says "D.A.?"

D.A. jumps and looks up, and then a little farther up. "Carlos? H-hey. Um. Wow." Her face goes red, and she buries it in her hands in mortification. "Oh, god, I didn't mean to–"

Carlos grins a bit awkwardly and takes a seat. "It's okay. Hey." He knows he's good-looking – he's got genetically smooth skin and good cheekbones and hair – but he's never been able to think of himself as a handsome man. Sure, he gets hit on a lot, by men and women alike, but it only takes a few minutes of conversation before he'll invariably show himself to be a complete dork. The majority of would-be flirters get a bit turned off by someone who involuntarily inserts the topic of electrons into almost every conversation he has and then blushes and stammers a lot about it afterwards.

"So," he says. "It's been a while. You... look good. What do you, um, do now?"

"Investigative journalist," D.A. says, looking distracted. She pushes her square-rimmed glasses – _glasses, that's new, probably_ – farther up her nose and glances at the laptop open on the table in front of her. "And you're a chemical engineer who studies paranormal phenomena in his spare time. I know. Look, Carlos–"

"Yeah," Carlos says, all ears, all business. "What's up?"

D.A. looks straight at him over the laptop sitting between them. "Have you ever heard of a town called Night Vale?"

Carlos blinks at her. "Night Vale? Um..." There's something there at the back of his mind, one of the things that kept coming up on websites he read, one of the many things that could be urban legend or not. "That's supposed to be an anomalous town in the Southwest, isn't it? I think I read about it on the SCP Foundation site. I'm not sure yet whether they're legit or not -- not sure it's in my best interests to find out. Why? I didn't know you were–" He stops himself. _I didn't know you were interested in that kind of thing,_ he says. He feels uncomfortably like a closet conspiracy theorist meeting someone who seemed normal at first before turning out to own a collection of tinfoil hats.

"I'm not, actually. But, well." D.A. pulls the laptop back toward herself, tight-lipped. "You remember Arnold?"

"Yeah, of course. Wait, he's in this too?"

"Oh, yeah. Well, he and I are still in contact, somewhat, and about a month ago he kind of accidentally hacked into the CIA website--"

"Sorry, he _accidentally_ hacked into the CIA website?" Carlos interrupts. Good god, what kind of people did he go to school with? he thinks, and then remembers that he's a self-proclaimed cryptozoologist. He isn't really one to talk.

"Yes," D.A. says. "It was for practice, apparently. Anyway, he was poking around their archives, and completely on a whim he..." She pauses, and looks guilty.

"Yes?" Carlos says encouragingly.

"He searched for... well," D.A. says, red-faced. "Well. He found something, Carlos. It's legitimate. This is on a government website." She turns the laptop toward Carlos so he can see. It's a scan of a the front page of a newspaper -- the _Night Vale Daily Journal_ , apparently. The headline says: _40-Year NVES Teacher Retires_ , and there's a grainy black-and-white photo of a woman -- an apparently quite young woman -- standing in front of a school bus.

"Well?" Carlos says, and then he looks closer. Then he whips off his glasses and looks closer still.

"Jesus Christ," he says. "No _way_."

He magnifies the page and stares at the picture some more, then reads the tiny print beside it out loud. "'Valerie F. Frizzle (immortal), a Night Vale native and longtime favorite third-grade teacher of Night Vale Elementary School, announced Monday that she plans to retire after this school year and seek alternative employment outside of Night Vale. Ms. Frizzle stated that this decision was primarily due to recent changes in the NVES curriculum which banned all teachers from covering any scientific materials in their classrooms or even  answering students' questions about subjects as seemingly harmless as the color of the sky–' Okay, D.A., what is this?"

"Look at the date on the paper," D.A. says quietly. Carlos does.

"1957-- no. No way. Absolutely no way. But she doesn't even look any older-- what _is_ this?"

"Damned if I know," D.A. says wearily. She looks very tired, Carlos thinks. Investigative journalism... not really a low-stress job. "None of us know what to make of it. Arnold's been terrified someone will find out he hacked the site and come after him. But you _study_ this stuff, Carlos. We need your help. Someone's got to figure out what this place _is_. And what... _her_ connection is to it. Because this is just... just weird. I mean, until last month I'd convinced myself that I had made up everything about third grade, but if I-- if we haven't, then... this is going to drive me insane unless we figure out what's going on. With her, and it, and everything."

"What, like you want me to visit the town or something?" Carlos starts to laugh, and then stops. Because if this is real, and Night Vale and all the things he's heard about it are real, then...

This is what he's been waiting for, he thinks. His whole life. This is the call.

"Okay," he says softly. "I'll see if I can get clearance to take a team of scientists. I probably will, I work for the government now. I'll find out... something. Maybe not what you want, but something."

D.A. smiles at him. "Atta boy," she says. "I knew we could count on you."

Carlos doesn't go back to the lab that night, because by the time he's finished catching up with D.A. it's too late for even him to go back to work. When he wakes up the next morning he lies in bed for a minute, staring up at the ceiling just to run through some thoughts and make sure last night actually happened, and then pulls his laptop clumsily onto his chest and Googles 'Night Vale'.

An hour and a half later he makes his way out of bed, half thrilled by what he's found out and half frustrated at how little there was to find, and makes a call to the offices of the vague yet high-up-sounding government agency which employs him. He's aiming to just ask how to apply for a research grant, but as soon as he mentions the name Night Vale, the secretary says 'Hold, please,' and hangs up on him. He's beginning to wonder just what _that_ was about, and whether he should be offended or frightened, when the government agency calls him back. He's got a grant for a two-year research project on Night Vale, living expenses and a team of five other scientists included, no questions asked, and they'd like him to start driving out as soon as possible. Next week, if at all feasible.

Carlos spends about five minutes saying 'Yes, absolutely' and 'That sounds great' and about five more minutes after he hangs up staring into space and thinking _What the_ **hell** _was_ **that** _?_ Overnight his life has gone from mundane to... to _what_?

The government knows about Night Vale, he reasons. And they've been waiting for someone to volunteer to investigate it. They probably like me. They always said the radiation research was going to get me places someday. No reason to... be suspicious at all. Or anything.

He spends the rest of the week tidying up loose ends in his life – moving on short notice is hell, but not as much of a hell as it could be if he had more material possessions. At 10:0 AM sharp on Wednesday, he's waiting with a duffel bag over his shoulder outside the apartment which was his until today for the big white government van to come and pick him up.

Two other scientists are already in the van, one of them driving and the other sitting in the back, babysitting the equipment. They introduce themselves as Lydia and Jahmal, respectively, and Carlos thinks they're going to get along pretty well. Lydia says they'll pick up the other three scientists on the drive down. As they leave the outskirts of town and pull onto the highway, Carlos stares out through the darkened window and just hopes that this is a good move in his career and not the end of it.

Lydia turns on the radio as the van speeds down the interstate, and the low mumble of the radio announcer is comforting. Carlos watches the scenery changing and tries to relax.

It takes them three days to get to the Southwest, driving most of the day and eating at roadside chains. They pick up Terry, Jadzia, and Alejandro on the way through Texas – they're all grad students in their twenties, apparently smart but a lot less... professional than Carlos was expecting. With them in the car there's a lot less listening to the radio and a lot more listening to Jadzia and Terry belting out showtunes at the top of their lungs with the lyrics changed relatively non-clumsily to fit scientific themes. Carlos is a bit dubious as to how they're going to actually get any research done.

And then it's late afternoon of the third day, and they're driving down Highway 800 with a big half-full moon following them in strict disobedience of the narrative laws of day vs. night if not the physical ones, and there's... a change in the air. The grad students fall silent, and they all just gaze out at the orange desert and scrubby sagebrush. And then they see the town on the horizon, a shimmer in the air which might or might not be heat surrounding the sand-colored buildings, and even from this distance the architecture is...

"Holy _shit_ ," Alejandro breathes in awe, echoing everyone's thoughts. Lydia fumbles almost absently at the knob for the radio, turning it without looking, and a station crackles to life with a burst of static.

" _A friendly desert community_ ," the man on the radio says, and something about the vibrations of his voice changes the way the air feels, " _where the sun is hot, the moon is beautiful, and mysterious lights pass overhead while we all pretend to sleep. Welcome... to Night Vale_."

And Carlos Ramon stares out the window at the beautiful and impossible town ahead of him and knows that he's come to _exactly_ the right place.


End file.
